Andrew Sullivan says he’ll use it less scrupulously than the president. But based on what evidence? Current policy is plenty unscrupulous already.
Asked about drone strikes during Monday’s foreign policy debate, Mitt Romney basically said that President Obama is right to use them. Expect more drone warfare in 2013 regardless of who wins the election. Does that mean that the two candidates are indistinguishable on the issue? My friend and former boss Andrew Sullivan doesn’t think so. “Memo to Conor Friedersdorf,” he wrote while live-blogging at The Dish. “You think Romney would be as scrupulous in drone warfare as Obama?” Implicit is the judgment that Obama has been “scrupulous.”
But it isn’t so.
Sullivan and I agree that Obama won last night’s debate, and that he’d be likely to preside over a more prudent, reality-based foreign policy than Romney, based on the respective campaigns that they’ve run. On drones, however, Romney appears to have the exact same position as Obama. And Obama has been egregiously unscrupulous. I don’t want to hear the dodge about how drone strikes are necessary. It’s beside the point. This is about the specific ways Obama has waged the drone war. Even if you agree in theory with drone strikes, Obama’s actions ought to bother you.
Let me be specific:
As Jane Mayer noted when describing the CIA’s drone strikes, “The program is classified as covert, and the intelligence agency declines to provide any information to the public about where it operates, how it selects targets, who is in charge, or how many people have been killed.”
The Obama Administration avoids judicial accountability by arguing that the drone program is secret, even as it acknowledges the existence of the program when bragging about killing terrorists.
As the Mayer article goes on to state, “because of the C.I.A. program’s secrecy, there is no visible system of accountability in place, despite the fact that the agency has killed many civilians inside a politically fragile, nuclear-armed country with which the U.S. is not at war. Should something go wrong in the C.I.A.’s program — last month, the Air Force lost control of a drone and had to shoot it down over Afghanistan — it’s unclear what the consequences would be.”
According to The New York Times, “Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”
The Obama Administration permits the CIA to carry out “signature strikes” even though they don’t know the identity of the people they’re trying to kill!
As Glenn Greenwald explained, “In February, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism documented that after the U.S. kills people with drones in Pakistan, it then targets for death those who show up at the scene to rescue the survivors and retrieve the bodies, as well as those who gather to mourn the dead at funerals.”
As a report published by the law clinics at NYU and Standford document, innocent people in Waziristan are being terrorized and traumatized daily by Obama’s drone war. And the policy has killed, at minimum, hundreds of innocent people, a judgment that is supported even by data from the New America Foundation, whose methods almost certainly under-count dead innocents.
So to sum up, Obama has implemented a global killing program with zero checks and balances; he’s operated it out of the CIA rather than the Department of Defense; he invokes the state-secrets privilege to avoid defending it in court, even as he brags about its efficacy; it includes killing people whose identities we don’t even know; all military-aged males we kill are presumed to be “militants”; the Pakistani government reportedly gets to pick some of the targets; at minimum, hundreds of innocents have been killed, including rescuers and funeral-goers; a 16-year-old American citizen was among those killed; and Sullivan, having been exposed many times to all the information I’ve just included, thinks its accurate to call Obama’s drone program “scrupulous,” though it could easily be made more transparent, accountable, and lawful.
What really gets me is that, in addition to arguing that Obama has run this program scrupulously (something implied in Sullivan’s question, and explicitly argued in threads like this one), Sullivan has also himself articulated almost all of the reasons why the program has been unscrupulous — that is to say, why Obama’s drone policy “disregards, or has contempt for, laws of right or justice with which he is perfectly well acquainted, and which should restrain his actions.”
“One thing I’ve learned this past decade is that the CIA is pretty much its own judge, jury and executioner,” Sullivan wrote. “It is much less accountable to the public, more likely to break the laws of war and destroy the evidence, more likely to do things that could escalate rather than ameliorate a conflict.” Is it scrupulous to pick an organization like that to run your drone program?
Says Sullivan’s post from June of 2011 (emphasis added):
Obama is now engaged in two illegal wars — in Libya and in Yemen. There was no Congressional debate or vote on these wars — and one is being waged by the CIA with unmanned drones. I think we have learned a little about what happens when you give the CIA carte blanche to run a war with no accountability except to a president who has a vested interest in covering up errors.
Said Sullivan on another occasion, “Put drones in the hands of an executive who is empowered to do anything without any input from the other branches of government … and we have a problem indeed.” He is also on record stating that “counting every military-age man in the vicinity of a Jihadist as a terrorist is a total cop-out,” and he even wrote that “if the CIA, based on its own intelligence, can launch a war or wars with weapons that can incur no US fatalities, the propensity to be permanently at war, permanently making America enemies, permanently requiring more wars to put out the flames previous wars started, then the Founders’ vision is essentially over. I think it’s a duty to make sure their vision survives this twenty-first century test.”
So let’s get back to Sullivan’s debate night question. “You think Romney would be as scrupulous in drone warfare as Obama?” My best guess is that, on drone warfare, their policies would be about the same — that is to say, alarmingly unscrupulous, with unpredictable consequences. That’s what happens when you give someone the power to kill without checks in secret.
I have no reason to think one or the other would predictably kill more innocent people with drones. Does Sullivan? If Romney wins, what odds would Sullivan give on the proposition that Romney ultimately kills more civilians with drones than Obama has? Based on what evidence? Obama has already killed an American citizen without trial and conducted drone strikes in a country where no war has been declared, so I don’t see how Romney would set any precedents that are even more alarming. (What precedent would that be?) Overall, I have no idea whose drone war would be more damaging. Having watched Sullivan strongly denounce and other times defend Obama’s drone war in posts that cannot be reconciled with one another, I don’t think he knows either.
So what if Romney is elected and turns out to be much worse on drones? It could totally happen. I wouldn’t be surprised. I’ll be opposing his unaccountable killing policy from day one regardless, just as I’ve opposed Obama’s policy due to its manifold flaws. And if Romney’s drone policy turns out to have all sorts of catastrophic consequences? I hope Sullivan remembers that Obama established the bipartisan consensus behind a worldwide drone-strike strategy and set all the necessary precedents without losing the support of backers like Sullivan. (He didn’t even lose support for continuing his current drone policy itself.) A Romney drone fleet, operating in numerous countries with zero oversight from the judiciary or Congress, with American citizens in the crosshairs? Obama and his supporters built that. It would be ready for President Romney on day one.
In news that is likely to surprise absolutely no one, Tim Pawlenty — who recently stepped down as Mitt Romney’s campaign co-chair in order to pursue a career as a lobbyist for the banking industry– has announced that the best way to prevent further apocalyptic financial meltdowns from occuring is to allow banks to “voluntarily” regulate themselves. (Just as a quick reminder, The Daily Dolt is not a satire website. This is an actual thing that Tim Pawlenty actually said, out loud, to other human beings who were alive during the 2008 Wall Street crisis.)
Pawlenty, the former Republican governor of Minnesota and unsuccessful presidential candidate, announced last week that he was stepping down as co-chairman of the Romney campaign in order to head the Financial Services Roundtable, a lobbying group that represents some of the largest financial services companies in the country. In his first press conference since announcing his new role, Pawlenty asked banks to “voluntarily” stop doing “stupid things”:
[Pawlenty] said he was asked while interviewing for the Roundtable job about how financial institutions can regain the public’s trust.
“I said, ‘Stop doing stupid things,’” Pawlenty said while sitting in the Roundtable’s Washington offices.
“These are large organizations with tens of thousands of employees in many cases. There is always going to be some individual doing something that’s off track. That’s human nature. But the obligation and the opportunity of the organizations is to put controls in place and a culture in place that minimizes the likelihood of that, but does it voluntarily.”
Pawlenty is not alone in his scorn for financial regulation. Mitt Romney has previously said he would “like to repeal [the] Dodd-Frank [law],” which was enacted to prevent another financial crisis like the one that occurred in 2008. “The extent of regulation in the banking industry has become extraordinarily burdensome following Dodd-Frank,” Romney told a roundtable of 18 businessmen last year at the ironically named restaurant, The Common Man.
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Hey, speaking of capitalism, remember that thing you’ve totally been meaning to buy on Amazon recently? How about you go do that now?Because then we make money, which will allow us to quit our day job to write for the Dolt full-time, which means more political fart jokes for everyone, which in turn is good for you. See? It’s the Circle of Capitalism. Aww, Tim Pawlenty would be so proud of all of us right now.
ProPublica rounds up the best investigative reporting on campaign finance.
This week, we’re exposing the world of campaign finance post-Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court case that opened the door to super PACs. The stories fall into three categories: donor profiles, pieces on super PACs, and scandals (though as Michael Kinsley said, “The scandal in Washington isn’t what’s illegal; it’s what’s legal”).
This roundup focuses on national stories, but you can find more under our Campaign Finance tag on MuckReads. Did we miss any? Email [email protected]
The Donors
CovertOperations,The New Yorker, August 2010
This 2011 National Magazine Award finalist profiles the billionaire Koch brothers, who are using their money to try to promote libertarian ideals. The resulting “ideological network” of foundations, think tanks, and political movements has become so sprawling that in political circles it’s known as the “Kochtopus.”
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Is Gingrich’s Hard Line on Palestine Paid for by Sheldon Adelson?, Daily Beast,January 2012
Sheldon Adelson is the seventh–richestman in the United States, and the largest donor to the pro-Gingrich super PAC Winning Our Future. As this 2008 New Yorker profile shows, he also opposes a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and wields enormous political influence in Israel. Some wonder if his views affected Gingrich’s “hard-line” stance on Palestine.
TheOperator, New Republic, April 2012
Harold Simmons is the 2012 campaign’s biggest donor. So what does he want from all his political giving?
Contributed by @Jake_Bernstein
TheAttackDog, The New Yorker, February 2012
Larry McCarthy, the media consultant who helps run the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future, is Washington’s go-to guy for negative ads. He rose to prominence for the racially charged Willie Horton ad that helped George H.W. Bush get elected in 1988.
Super PACs
FirmGives $1 MilliontoPro–RomneyGroup, ThenDissolves, MSNBC, August 2011 Need a good example of the secret money fueling the 2012 election? This mystery company donated $1 million to the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future—and then promptly dissolved. At the time, it was one of the biggest contributions of the election cycle.
Contributed by @SteveEngelberg
MostIndependentAdsfor 2012 ElectionAreFromGroupsThatDon’tDiscloseDonors, Washington Post, April 2012
You can thank anonymous donors for 90 percent of the total spent on advertising so far in the 2012 presidential election. The funds are funneled through social welfare nonprofits, also known as 501(c)4s, that do not have disclose their donors.
The 2012 MoneyRace: CompareTheCandidates,New York Times
If you want to track super PAC money, we’re going to point you to PACTrack. But when it comes to candidates’ fundraising, the New York Times’ news app is pretty sweet.
BundlersOntheInside, iWatch/ABC News, September 2011
Several of Obama’s top political supporters went to work within the Energy Department as it pumped stimulus money into alternative energy firms. Some supporters were also investors in companies that applied for government loans. (Part of a series on the stimulus-backed, and now bankrupt, Solyndra.)
Contributed by @paulkiel
DoubtsRaisedonDonationstoComptroller, New York Times, October 2011
New York City comptroller John C. Liu was considered a contender to succeed Mayor Michael Bloomberg, thanks in part to his robust fundraising machine. But when the New York Times canvassed nearly 100 homes and workplaces of donors listed in Mr. Liu’s campaign finance reports, they found several irregularities, including some that raised questions about whether some donors actually existed. Liu’s campaign is now under federal investigation.
Contributed by @srubenfeld
HouseFreshmenPushBillsthatBenefitBigDonors,USA Today, August 2011
Despite promises to change Washington, several House freshmen began their terms by pushing legislation that benefited some of their biggest donors.
Contributed by @rlocker12
(how politicians are ‘purchased’ by powerful men with an agenda)
The official trailer for ‘The Campaign’ starring Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis as political rivals in a race for Congress in a North Carolina district. Ferrell plays incumbent congressman Cam Brady who makes a major public goof that forces a bunch of wealthy CEOs to put up a rival for his seat in Congress in the form of Galifianakis’ Marty Huggins, the director of the local Tourism Center.
Because then we make money, which will allow us to quit our day job to write for the Dolt full-time, which means more political fart jokes for everyone, which in turn is good for you. See? It’s the Circle of Capitalism. Aww, Tim Pawlenty would be so proud of all of us right now. 
